What a week.
Tuesday. Rev. Raphael Warnock is declared one of two new Senators from the state of Georgia. The first Black Senator ever from a state known for voter suppression.
In his victory speech, Warnock, the 11th of 12 children, invoked his mother, now 82, who began life picking other people’s cotton, but lived to pick her youngest son and vote for him as a Senator.
“May my story be an inspiration to some young person who is trying to … grab hold of the American dream.” Warnock offered his life as example…
May my story be an inspiration…
There is much in this story: the truth of racism in our past and in our present…that is there. The struggle for liberation by Black Americans and allies and the critical role of the Black church…that is there too. Progress we have made…is in that story. Yes. And hope for the future.
His election brought tears to my eyes. And I know that I am not the only one.
Wednesday. Afternoon. President Trump dispatches a mob of his white supremacist followers to the US Capital…to interrupt the counting of the ballots that would end his tragic and deadly, failed presidency. “Trial by combat,” was urged. “Fight like hell,” he told them. “I will be with you,” he lied.
The Capital police were no match, even where they tried. The mob occupied and vandalized the Capital, Senators and congress people had to hide for safety.
Virtually no arrests were made.
The almost all white… What to call them? Terrorists is perhaps best.
The almost all white terrorists simply walked out of the Capital, leaving debris and desecration, and the dead.
Among the acts of violence, the Confederate flag, the symbol of America’s original sin—a symbol used to terrorize People of Color to this very day– was paraded, for the first time, through the halls of Congress.
Clint Smith, in the Atlantic, pointed out the painting of Unitarian Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, just behind the flag. In 1856 Sumner was beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor, by another Senator, for criticizing slavery…
Wednesday was the first time the Confederate flag despoiled the Capital, but white racial violence is no stranger to the halls of Congress.
On the wall ahead of the flag is a painting of John C. Calhoun… who attended All Souls Unitarian in DC, (though we are more reluctant to claim him as one of ours)…Senator from S. Carolina, later Vice-President, Calhoun was one of slavery’s most prominent defenders: “…instead of [being] an evil, [slavery is] a good—a positive good.”
There is so much in the story of the terrorist occupation:
The sedition by the white supremacist President.
The failure of the Capital police…so different from the violent military response to peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters just months before.
The casual atmosphere of the occupation…once they breeched the doors. Strolling through the halls. Feet on desks. Selfies. Almost a carnival atmosphere.
That, too, not new. White families packed picnic lunches to attend lynching’s, often immediately after church.
Terrorism often has the quality of a performance. It is intended to be observed.
Staying present has been a test for many of us this week. So much unavoidably visible this week. This has been a test for me.
The political posturing has been intense since Wednesday.
Should the President resign? Be removed as unfit? Impeached again? What happened with the police? Will Trump’s followers return for the Inauguration? Who will be punished? Held accountable?
These are important questions to be sure.
But those are not the religious, the spiritual questions that we need to address here.
I am the Sr. Minister of this church. A Black man called to offer spiritual leadership to this congregation.
Called to speak out of a tradition that was home to both Charles Sumner and John C. Calhoun…
What does this community…in its diversity and its sameness…what does this community need to hear from me this morning?
Am I called to ease a shock I do not feel? Because the racism and the violence of Trump and his supporters is not a surprise to me. It is not a surprise to any of the people of color I have spoken with since Wednesday.
I want to speak first, for a moment, to the Black, Indigenous and People of Color members of this community and to any other BIPOC persons who may have joined us this morning.
It is not your responsibility to fix the culture of white supremacy. Perhaps you can help, most POC try to help…as I do. But the responsibility for dismantling racism rests with the people who are privileged by the racial hierarchy.
Your work…our work…as POC…is to survive the racial hierarchy and violence…as our ancestors did. To find a way out of no way…as they did. With Rev. Warnock, our lives are our legacy.
This week is difficult for us in some different ways. Care for yourself and those you love.
First, survive.
And…you do not need to make things ok for the white persons in your circle. It is not your job to affirm that they are some of the “good ones.” It is not your responsibility to comfort them as they struggle with uncomfortable truths.
We love some of these people, but it is not our job to protect their fragility by continuing to center their discomfort. Care-taking of the white liberal community is some of the most draining work that POC are asked to do in liberal America.
Let the white persons in your circles, the white persons that you love… do their own work.
This does not mean that we cannot be in community together. Our faith insists that we can. But we enter with some different needs. And there are differences in the kind of work we need to do.
Now, to the whole community. What are the religious questions that we need to at least ask this week?
“How could this happen?” “In America, how could this be?” “This isn’t who we are, is it?”
This week raises questions of identity. The answer to those questions is clear.
Because the racism so prominently on display is exactly who and what America is and has been from its very inception. Trumpism is only the latest and most obvious embodiment of the culture of white supremacy that, in this church, we are beginning to dismantle.
If someone tells you over and over who they are…believe them.
America has told us what it is by slavery and apartheid, by Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow, by theft of this land and Japanese internment, by cages on the border and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act…
By 74 million Americans who voted for 4 more years, choosing whiteness over democracy…
By every Black body killed by police…
America has been telling us what it is, who it protects and who it has always been designed to benefit…
We need to view this nation with clear eyes. See not a city on the hill…not an exceptional America…or a nearly perfect Portland for that matter…
I was blind, but now I see. With apology to the disability community for the metaphor, it is time to take the blinders from our eyes, especially those of us who identify as white.
The Englishman who wrote Amazing Grace…late in his life…came to understand the evil he had perpetuated clearly…
and, as the Quartet sang, to go deeper.
The question is whether you…whether we…are willing to go deeper now. That is the religious question. Whether you, whether we are able to open our eyes and our hearts…and to refuse to leave the job of justice half done…again.
Because that is the great failing of the American experiment…and the liberal religious community. We never finish the job.
What do I mean? Take Reconstruction. Changes were happening in the South after the Civil War. Blacks were voting, being elected. But in the Hayes/Tilden compromise we’ve heard a lot about recently, Reconstruction was ended so that Jim Crow could be imposed.
People of good will looked away.
And freedom for the formerly enslaved persons was traded for political convenience.
Take Brown v Board…separate but equal is never equal…Could have opened the way toward real change.
But suburban communities were exempted from desegregation plans. And the federal government built highways to take the white middle class further and further from the urban renewal of the central cities. And our schools are more segregated today than they were in 1954…for five generations of our children.
We celebrate the legal victories of the Civil Rights struggle. But how many were willing to see the New Jim Crow replacing legal apartheid? People of good will closed our eyes. We didn’t finish the job.
We celebrated the first Black President…saw Obama’s election as proof of progress… What we did not want to see was that Obama lost the white vote in each of his elections…
We saw what we wanted to see…progress toward Beloved Community…Only to discover Trump in the White House.
We need to see with clear eyes and be willing to see change through…to allow the arc of justice to be completed.
And for religious people…for us…here is the hardest part.
The President has called for healing. Yes, the white supremacist President and other conservative politicians are calling for reconciliation.
I don’t believe them for a moment. What they want is our passivity.
Because you know…and I know…that we are not ready for healing.
On a one-on-one basis, personal reconciliation is hard enough.
But as a society…we are not ready…because we have not come close to dealing with the truth.
There is a reason that Truth and Reconciliation need to be paired.
The truth is that there are two vastly different visions for this nation… that are in contest…in competition.
One is a vision of a vibrantly pluralistic, multi-cultural, multi-religious society…in which our differences are seen as a source of strength…not as threats…in which we see power in our pluralism and hope in our diversity.
It is a vision in which both power and resources are more equitably shared and the diversity of our identities is a source of celebration.
This is the vision of the Beloved Community. This is our religious vision.
We are far from making it real. But the vision is clear.
It is possible that the Beloved Community today may, just barely, be a majority vision. I offer Georgia in evidence.
But there is another vision. That vision calls for a return to a lost Eden of white and Christian majority control…in which diversity is reluctantly accepted for the few tokens…
In this vision Black and Brown people are expendable, welcomed only as they…as we…are needed for labor.
This is a vision of gender rigidity and male dominance. It is actually the vision of our Founding Fathers…for a new nation in which white men of property maintained control…despite Jefferson’s Enlightenment language.
We the people…did not include most of us.
Two visions. In competition.
These visions cannot both be realized. It is either one or the other…
And so the notion of healing is not helpful. The disciplines of compromise don’t compute.
This nation is…finally… going to have to choose. And then finish the job…
We thought, many of us…we wanted to believe… that although progress toward the Beloved Community might be slow… it was only a matter of time…and effort…
But this week…this week has demonstrated that the Beloved Community is not a guaranteed outcome.
A majority may have chosen Beloved Community as a goal. But 74 million Americans said “no.”
And so we have to recalibrate. And we have to recommit. And gather our resources…our spiritual resources and our resources of resolve…
We need to be clear…
I want to point to three priorities.
First, presence is our spiritual theme this month. We need to be present to the truth of this contest for the soul of the nation and the deep divides within the body politic. We cannot allow our optimism or our hope to dim our ability to see clearly what is true.
Second, it is not enough to be right, for us to be on the right side of history…though we are. It is not enough to have the perfect analysis. It is effectiveness we need, not righteousness. We need to begin changing things. Real lives are hanging in the balance.
And third, there are many who hold that other vision whom we probably cannot convince. We will try to change hearts and minds…certainly of those people we are close to. But I believe we would better invest our time in making the institutions in which we live move toward our vision of Beloved Community.
We need to continue our advocacy, of course. But we also need to change what we can…where we live. That is Portland and the communities that make it up…its schools and its policing… and its churches. We are clearly a majority in this community. We should start acting like it.
Preachers are supposed to end with the Good News.
Let me encourage you to remember Georgia and what organizing and energy can accomplish. The task is not hopeless…just hard.
The arc of the universe…can bend.
And, we are answering the call of love. If we make love real by the living of our lives, love will be there to meet us and guide us. These commitments are spiritual commitments…deeply spiritual. It is not just the soul of the NATION that is at stake.
Now the summons sounds again.
A still, small voice …
filled with love…
Can we respond with our lives?
Will we join the gathering ranks
to reflect the Light of Presence into a
confused [and divided] world?
Can we respond with our lives?
Having lived through this week…how can we not?
Amen
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love…that moves in our lives
And through our living moves in the world.
We are called to live in the world as it is
And to work for the world as it ought to be.
That is easy when victories come and changes
Bend our way. Georgia made it easy to love the world this week.
But the assault on the Capital was a test.
We are re-gathering ourselves,
Finding our center and testing its strength again
Knowing that another difficult week may lie ahead.
Be with us, Spirit, comfort us, strengthen us.
Help us live through the sadness and the anger
That may come our way.
And help us remember that we are not the first
To struggle to keep faith and hope alive
Nor the last to wonder when love
And justice will triumph.
Be with us. We are listening.
We are preparing ourselves to hear love’s call
Preparing ourselves to listen for even that
Still, small voice that can lead us and guide us
Toward hope.
Amen
Topics: Presence